Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR), a task that involves the oral imitation of sen-tences containing target linguistic forms, is linked to children's language profi-ciency and ability. Among bilingual children, it can be challenging to determine benchmarks for typical and atypical SR performance due to variations in past and current language experiences. Method: In this cross-sequential longitudinal analysis of 268 Spanish-English bilinguals, we investigated the effects of developmental language disorder (DLD) status, age of first language exposure, and time-varying current language expo-sure on SR in both Spanish and English. Our findings model 7-year trajectories (from ages 5 to 12 years) of SR development by children with and without DLD across varying degrees of language exposure. Results: All children demonstrated gains in both languages over time. Spanish scores were higher than English scores at baseline, but English performance increased at approximately twice the rate of Spanish, resulting in comparable or higher English mastery by 12 years of age. Children with typical language devel-opment (TD) consistently outperformed their peers with DLD within each lan-guage, although growth patterns differed by language. In English, children with TD and those with DLD showed similar growth rates, maintaining a persistent performance gap. In Spanish, relatively modest growth among children with TD and steeper growth among children with DLD led to a reduction in the TD-DLD gap over time. Both cumulative and current language exposure contributed to SR performance, with differential effects across languages and diagnostic groups. Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of accounting for language history in educational and clinical programming.

PURPOSE:This study examines the diagnostic accuracy of four measures derived from English narrative language samples for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in 5- and 6-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. METHOD:Ninety-two children aged 5;0-6;11 (years;months) produced narrative retells in English using Mercer Mayer's frog stories. Forty-six matched pairs of children with DLD and typical language were identified based on age and English language exposure. Percent grammatical utterances (PGU), errors per C-unit (EPC), mean length of utterance (MLU), and subordination index (SI) were calculated. Pooled, covariate-adjusted, and multivariate receiver operating characteristic curves were generated to evaluate the measures' diagnostic performance at optimal cutoffs. Analyses were also performed at different levels of language exposure (i.e., high English, balanced Spanish/English, high Spanish). RESULTS:None of the measures reached 80% for both sensitivity and specificity for the full participant group. Covariate-adjusted curves based on exposure were not significantly different from pooled analyses. When exposure groups were analyzed separately, PGU and EPC each yielded good diagnostic accuracy for the high English group (> 70% exposure) at 94% sensitivity and specificity. Combining these measures with MLU and/or SI yielded similar results. For the balanced exposure group, all measures fell below the 80% threshold. CONCLUSIONS:Measures of grammaticality (PGU and EPC) were the best indicators of DLD when analyzing English narrative language samples of young bilinguals with at least 70% exposure to English. None of the measures evaluated were adequate for identifying DLD in bilinguals with less exposure to English. Clinical implications are discussed. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL:https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31449370.

Our understanding of the neurobiology of language development is imprecise, particularly for bilingual children in their heritage language, since much research focuses on monolingual children or societal majority languages. In this study, we use a novel computational approach to quantifying linguistic predictions with fNIRS neuroimaging to examine bilingual children's (N = 88, ages 7-12) brain activity as they listen to a naturalistic story in their heritage language of Spanish. The children demonstrated successful neural tracking of word predictability in their heritage language, suggesting they can form rich linguistic representations in Spanish. There were some trends for reading and listening comprehension abilities in English and Spanish to modulate neural tracking of predictability in a Spanish story, but no effects were reliable enough to interpret with confidence. Overall, this first use of a predictability-based computational, naturalistic listening comprehension approach with bilingual children demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its utility for studying language development.

Background: Bilingual children experience varying levels of exposure to their languages as they develop their linguistic knowledge. Therefore, test developers must account for exposure during construction of language assessments to avoid mismeasurement. The current study aims to examine how language exposure affects item parameterization in bilingual morphosyntax tasks. Method: Using English data from 484 bilingual children and Spanish data from 403 bilingual children aged 7 to 11 years, we conducted item response theory (IRT) analyses to examine the relative effects of exposure on item parameterization. Whole-sample Rasch and multiple-group two-parameter logistic models were used to explore these effects. Results: IRT results suggested differential patterns of item parameterization, namely, difficulty and discrimination, for groups with varied levels of English exposure. Conclusion: These results highlight the need for thorough and nuanced analysis of item parameters and influences on test performance during the development of language assessments intended for use with bilingual populations. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.32410173

PURPOSE:The Bilingual Input-Output Survey (BIOS)-Home (Peña et al., 2018) is used to provide speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with an estimate of children's exposure to two languages. The current hour-by-hour approach of the BIOS can be time consuming to administer and calculate. The current study seeks to improve the efficiency of the BIOS-Home by replicating Calandruccio et al.'s (2021) finding that the BIOS can be shortened by time periods around children's routines and extending these findings by preliminarily exploring the relationship of the shortened BIOS with results of a bilingual screener. METHOD:The current study includes 1,337 Spanish-English bilingual children from two data sets. Children's ages ranged from 49 to 71 months (M = 60.58, SD = 4.96). BIOS-Home data were collected by trained bilingual research assistants and SLPs who interviewed caregivers on their children's language input and output hour by hour. Principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted using caregiver-reported BIOS-Home data from both data sets to determine the smallest number of time chunks that could be used to measure language exposure. To explore the validity of the shortened BIOS-Home, bivariate correlation analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between children's semantics and morphosyntax scores and the original and shortened versions of the BIOS-Home. RESULTS:PCAs using the two data sets identified three time periods (morning, afternoon, and late afternoon/evening) for weekday receptive language and three time periods (morning, afternoon, and evening) for weekend receptive language. Language test score correlations comparing the hour-by-hour and the shortened approaches are highly similar, supporting the validity of the shortened approach. CONCLUSION:Consolidating the BIOS-Home questionnaire is a viable approach that can save time and elicit valid information about children's bilingual input and output.

Purpose: This study attempts to discriminate developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals using only the child's second language (L2), English. We grouped bilinguals by their current weekly language experience (high English experience, balanced English/Spanish experience, high Spanish experience) as a way to evaluate which English grammatical test items yielded acceptable levels of diagnostic accuracy at different levels of language experience. Method: Three hundred seventy-eight Spanish-English bilingual children (65 with DLD) between the ages of 7 years and 9;11 (years;months) responded to English grammatical test items delivered via a sentence repetition and/or a cloze task. For each language experience group, test items with a discriminant value > .30 were retained and used to create a composite of items "tailored" to that experience group. Tailored composites were then entered in discriminant analyses, by group. Results: Children with DLD consistently scored below those with typical development; nonetheless, the same item set did not identify DLD equally well across language exposure groups. For instance, the item set tailored for children with high English experience yielded sensitivity and specificity of 80% and 94%, respectively, among children with > 60% English exposure. However, those same test items yielded sensitivity of only 20% for children with high Spanish experience. Conclusions: Testing a bilingual child in both of their languages remains the gold standard for diagnosing DLD. However, our results support the indexing of developmental expectations to measures of L2 experience when testing is constrained to English.

Purpose: The current study examines bilingual children's development of Spanish and English morphosyntax structures over the period of 1 year. Identification of morphosyntax forms clustered by difficulty can elucidate their development and guide clinicians to select appropriate targets for intervention and monitoring. Specifically, we aim to evaluate how morphosyntax performance of bilingual children at the initial time point is related to their performance 1 year later and whether longitudinal development is different for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: A total of 199 bilingual children (165 typically developing children and 34 children with DLD) between 7 and 10 years old completed a morphosyntax cloze task in both English and Spanish twice with 1 year apart. First, within-participant analysis of variance was used to identify morphosyntax clusters. We then used cross-lag analysis to study the relationship between morphosyntax clusters over time. Results: Morphosyntactic structures were clustered by difficulty in Spanish and English. There are three clusters of 1-3 morphosyntactic structures in Spanish and four clusters of 2-4 morphosyntactic structures in English. Cross-lag analysis demonstrated that for both languages, children's performance on simple items at Year 1 predicted performance on more difficult items 1 year later. Multigroup analysis indicated that most associations between morphosyntax clusters across time were not different for children with and without DLD. Conclusions: Findings on the difficulty levels of different morphosyntactic structures in Spanish-English bilingual children may provide implications for target selection when treating morphosyntax in this population. The study provides important insights into morphosyntactic change in bilingual school-age children in the United States, which are important to consider in bilingual language assessment and intervention.

This study examined the variability of language profiles in Spanish–English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). The data included 529 children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Eighty-eight of these children were identified as having DLD. A latent profile analysis was conducted based on children’s morphosyntax and semantics performance in Spanish and English. The optimal model identified five different profiles, illustrating the heterogeneity in bilingual development. Children with DLD were observed across all profiles, but most were classified in the only two profiles where lower morphosyntax than semantic performance was observed across languages. These results show the variability in both bilingual children with and without DLD. Additionally, the hallmark deficit of DLD in morphosyntax was confirmed, with the morphological weakness being observed in each of the bilingual children’s languages. Children’s background factors (age, maternal education and language exposure) were associated with profile characteristics.

PURPOSE:This study compared English grammatical performance of bilingual school-age children who spoke either Spanish or Vietnamese at home, focusing on their first-language influence on the acquisition of 13 English grammatical forms. METHOD:Scores from 30 children on a cloze task were analyzed for accuracy, developmental patterns, and error types. Pairwise matching was used to match individual Vietnamese and Spanish bilinguals on age and English experience. Caregivers rated language ability and daily use of the home language and English. RESULTS:Higher grammatical accuracy across groups was associated with older age and higher caregiver ratings of children's language ability. Groups showed similar patterns on some grammatical forms (e.g., higher accuracy on plurals than irregular past), consistent with previously reported developmental patterns of monolingual English-speaking children. Differences in other patterns were related to first-language influence. For example, phonological constraints of Vietnamese (e.g., no word-final /s/), led to lower accuracy in English forms requiring such sounds. CONCLUSIONS:English grammatical performance in bilinguals can reflect both general developmental patterns and first-language influence. As bilingual children may rely on linguistic cues specific to their first language, classroom instruction can be adjusted to be more culturally and linguistically responsive.

Purpose: With over one third of students in the United States exposed to languages other than English at home, there is a growing need to examine the role of bilingual exposure across settings on bilingual language performance. This study explored the longitudinal relationship between language exposure at home and school, and changes in bilingual oral language performance from kindergarten to first grade. Method: One hundred sixty-four Spanish-English participants who had different levels of bilingual exposure at home and school were assessed on bilingual oral language performance using a standardized language assessment in kindergarten and first grade. Caregivers and teachers reported bilingual exposure at home and at school, respectively, for both time points. Results: The results indicated that Spanish home exposure at kindergarten uniquely predicted Spanish semantics in first grade, while Spanish school exposure at kindergarten uniquely predicted Spanish morphosyntax in first grade, after controlling for kindergarten performance. No differential contributions were observed for English exposure and performance. Children with high Spanish home exposure (> 60%) had significantly higher gains in standard scores for Spanish semantics and overall Spanish performance compared to the low Spanish exposure group, but there was no significant effect on changes in English standard scores across groups. Conclusions: The current study suggests that language exposure at home and school had different contributions to bilingual home language development. This supports the importance of home and school Spanish language exposure in promoting heritage language development without compromising English.

Purpose: This study investigated how word characteristics (frequency, cognate status, acquisition source, translation equivalence) influence vocabulary development in Spanish-English bilingual children. We examined (a) how second language (L2) exposure relates to lexical development in first language and L2 over time and (b) which lexical characteristics influence lexical development across languages. Method: We examined item-level vocabulary responses of Spanish-English bilingual children (n = 225, ages 5-12 years) tested on the same set of expressive vocabulary items in both languages across four annual time points. Using binomial generalized mixed-effects models, we analyzed how acquisition varied by word characteristic (frequency, cognate status, acquisition context, translation equivalence) while controlling for age and language exposure. Results: Key findings included that (a) high-frequency words showed greater odds of acquisition in both languages, (b) cognates demonstrated facilitative effects primarily in English, (c) home-acquired words were more readily learned than school-acquired words in both languages, and (d) knowledge of translations boosted acquisition in the other language. Conclusions: The findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition and demonstrate the integrated nature of bilingual lexical development. These results have important implications for bilingual education, suggesting that supporting first language development facilitates rather than hinders second language acquisition. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30660983

This paper examined the interaction between narrative performance, language exposure, and standardized measures of morphosyntax and semantics, in bilingual children tested two times, 1 year apart. We aimed to 1) identify the factor structure of oral narrative measures, and 2) examine the direction and strength of the effects of (i) language exposure and (ii) the relationship between language domains and narrative production. A total of 143 Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilingual children completed a battery of oral narrative and oral language proficiency assessments in Spanish and English at two time points (kindergarten and Grade 1). Factor analyses yielded an identical two-factor structure of bilingual oral narrative measurements, namely productivity (word production) and complexity (sentence structure), in both Spanish and English across the two time points. Cross-lagged analysis showed that narrative production predicted semantics and morphosyntax performance in Spanish and English one year later. Cross-language transfer from L1 to L2 on the complexity of narrative was noted. Language exposure predicted only Spanish narrative production, but not English. These results suggest within- and cross-language transfer, highlighting the importance of L1 language development. In addition, current findings highlight the importance of language exposure for L1 in early school-age children.

PURPOSE:The challenges of language assessment in bilinguals include a lack of assessment tools and bilingual speech-language pathology services. Additionally, the weighting of subtests in standardized tests has not been empirically explored to maximize sensitivity and specificity. Language exposure might also inform the decision to diagnose bilinguals with developmental language disorder (DLD). This study uses a nomogram, a user-friendly prediction tool, to explore the weighting between bilingual language tasks for diagnostic accuracy and single-language assessment feasibility with language exposure information. METHOD:Four hundred nine Spanish-English bilingual children aged 4-7 years completed a standardized bilingual language assessment with six subtests, and caregivers reported language exposure. Additional 326 and 296 Spanish-English bilingual children completed the Spanish or English portions of the assessment, respectively. Nomogram-based prediction models were constructed to evaluate the probability of DLD. Classification accuracy, calibration curves, and decision curve analysis were reported. RESULTS:The nomogram for the bilingual language assessment was generalizable to another sample, with varying subtest weightings. The addition of bilingual exposure did not improve the classification accuracy of the bilingual assessment, but it was an important variable when assessment was in one language only. Spanish-only assessment with bilingual exposure achieved the minimum acceptable sensitivity and specificity, whereas English-only assessment with bilingual exposure did not. CONCLUSIONS:This study suggests that subtest weighting ratios can help classify Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. The feasibility of single-language assessment and the clinical use of nomograms are discussed. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL:https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29874254.

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items.

The present study explores generalisation of production skills across languages when treating speech sound disorders in bilingual children. Early work suggests that treating shared sounds across languages may facilitate cross-linguistic generalisation. Thus, selecting shared sounds across languages as targets may have clinical advantages. In this study, we asked if cross-linguistic generalisation can be facilitated for targets using shared sounds in bilingual children with phonological delays from Spanish (L1) into English (L2) when treating only the L1. Two Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5;0-5;3 with speech sound disorders participated in an intervention with shared sounds as targets. Each child received two sessions per week of therapy that included both linguistically-based and motor-based approaches. Accuracy of targets was assessed within and across languages using a single-subject case design. Results show increased accuracy of targets and generalisation of sounds across languages when treatment was administered only in the L1. Specific growth varied per target and child. The implications affect how we select treatment targets in bilingual children. Future studies should explore additional ways to select targets to increase generalisation of skills and replicate with additional participants.

Brain development for language processing is associated with neural specialization of left perisylvian pathways, but this has not been investigated in young bilinguals. We examined specificity for syntax and semantics in early exposed Spanish -English speaking children (N = 65, ages 7-11) using an auditory sentence judgement task in English, their dominant language of use. During functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the morphosyntax task elicited activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the semantic task elicited activation in left posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Task comparisons revealed specialization in left superior temporal (STG) for morphosyntax and left MTG and angular gyrus for semantics. Although skills in neither language were uniquely related to specialization, skills in both languages were related to engagement of the left MTG for semantics and left IFG for syntax. These results are consistent with models suggesting a positive cross -linguistic interaction in those with higher language proficiency.

This study longitudinally modeled home language exposure patterns of US Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 4 and 12. Participants were 280 Spanish-English bilinguals (95% Hispanic, 52% female) who were followed for up to 5 years using a cross-sequential longitudinal design. Multilevel linear regression models were used to estimate language exposure trajectories across four home language sources (adults, peers, electronic media and literacy activities) and three language modes (Spanish-only, English-only and bilingual). Results demonstrated that Spanish interactions with both adults and peers declined as children aged, while bilingual interactions showed a distinct increase over time. Conversely, media exposure and engagement in literacy activities increased over time, irrespective of the language used. Children's age of first English exposure and current school English exposure also influenced language contact and use in the home. These findings approximate an 8-year exposure trajectory across a continuum of bilingual experiences.

PurposeThe study aimed to understand how bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD) use frequent word co-occurrences in their narratives.MethodWe studied the change over time in the word co-occurrences used by 30 Spanish-English bilingual children with and without DLD (experimental group). An additional normative group consisted of 98 TLD Spanish-English bilingual first graders. Children narrated two Spanish and two English stories in kindergarten and first grade. Employing a Python program on the transcribed narratives, we extracted all adjacent two-word and three-word co-occurrences. From the normative group, the 90 most frequently occurring two-word and 90 most frequently occurring three-word co-occurrences were extracted. The type and tokens of word co-occurrences each child in the experimental group produced out of the 180 identified word co-occurrences were analysed.ResultOverall, children at first grade produced more word co-occurrences types than in kindergarten. Children with DLD used fewer types of word co-occurrences but produced them as often as than their TLD peers. Children with DLD increased their word co-occurrences from kindergarten to first grade at the same rate although at a lower frequency. Children in both groups produced similar types and tokens of word co-occurrences in both Spanish and English, except tokens of two word co-occurrences. Children produced two word co-occurrences more often in English than in their Spanish narratives.ConclusionThe results shed light on children with DLD's deficits in production of word co-occurrences, indirectly reflecting possible deficits in statistical pattern detection.

PURPOSE:In this validation study, we examined the factor structure of the mediated learning observation (MLO) used during the teaching phase of dynamic assessment. As an indicator of validity, we evaluated whether the MLO factor structure was consistent across children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). METHOD:Two hundred twenty-four children (188 typically developing and 36 DLD) from kindergarten to second grade completed a 30-min individual mediated learning session on narrative production. Performance during the session was rated using the 12-item MLO by clinicians on affect, behavior, arousal, and elaboration. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to establish the factor structure and reliability of the MLO. RESULTS:Factor analysis of the MLO suggested a stable three-factor model with adequate fit indices across kindergarten and school-age samples, across both typically developing and DLD subgroups with good to excellent reliability. The final 11-item MLO (one item was removed due to low factor loading) comprises three subscales including (a) cognitive factor, (b) learning anticipation, and (c) learning engagement. CONCLUSIONS:The MLO is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing language learning skills in children with and without DLD during dynamic assessment. Practical implications and suggestions for future research addressing the utilization of MLO in dynamic assessment are provided.